


black eyes & long drives

by Ashling



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt Illya, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, No Plot/Plotless, warning for character being immobilized with a drug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26776306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: Illya should have been afraid.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo/Gaby Teller
Comments: 13
Kudos: 82
Collections: Writing Rainbow Black





	black eyes & long drives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coaldustcanary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coaldustcanary/gifts).



Illya should have been afraid, waking up in the pitch-black, stifled air of a small space, the rattle and shudder of it around him, being held down by somebody at his back, his own body aching and swollen like an overripe fruit, like something that would burst at a pinprick. His jaw locked up, muscles not quite working, replying to urgent commands with only little ungainly twitches. One eye bruised shut, the other seeing nothing, not even a glint. Face terribly cold, body wrapped up. Mind slow. He should have been terrified, but he wasn't. Some instinct saved him from that, as he put the pieces together, laboriously, and found that the darkness and rattle probably meant some kind of transportation, a truck, a wagon, some unlit back compartment. He should have cared about where he was being taken, but he didn't.

He almost closed his eyes again to rest, but then the vehicle gave a particularly abrupt jolt and the man next to him made a cut-off sound of frustration low back in his throat, and Illya realized why he wasn't afraid. His senses were overwhelmed with a lingering sense of wrongness—not just bruises, but even the insides of his joints made him feel as though he'd been torn apart and glued back together carelessly—but he could still catch, close by, a whiff of cologne. Spiced and sweet, a little musk underneath, too complex to pin down individual notes. Only a few weeks earlier, he had growled at Napoleon, _Your vanity will get us all killed,_ when what he meant was, _I could recognize you anywhere._

 _You always take me to the nicest places, Cowboy,_ he tried to say, because that beat asking about what had happened, but after the first few words got caught as garbled sound in his unresponsive mouth, he gave up. Napoleon heard, at least. Illya could feel it before he could hear it: the arm around him tightened, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to feel good. Then, in his ear, startlingly close: "You're all right. It's just me. It's just me." Like Illya was a horse that might spook. Stupid, really. Even if Illya didn't know all this already, what would he do when he was like this, floppy as a doll? Napoleon was supposed to go together with annoyance and Illya clung to that, though his heart wasn't in it. What he really wanted was to get control of his body again, so when Napoleon inevitably fell asleep—the man could sleep anywhere—Illya could turn his own cold face into the warmth of Napoleon's ridiculous turtleneck. He grunted, hoping it sounded surly. 

"Yeah, yeah," Napoleon muttered, and Illya was pleased with himself for that. "We're doing the best we can. We'll cross the border sometime in the next couple of hours, and Waverly's sending a medevac to sort you out. They were interrogating you, and that wasn't working, so they tried to use a truth serum, but you had an allergic reaction, and they panicked and injected you with a paralysis-inducing drug to stop you choking to death. Takes a while to wear off." Something nudged up against the back of Illya's neck. Napoleon's forehead, maybe. "You'll be all right, though," he said. 

"Incompetents," a voice snarled out from the blackness. “Who uses interrogation drugs without a stock of antidotes? _Fucking_ amateurs.” Illya felt an unexpected throb of uncut happiness. 

“Forgot to say,” Napoleon murmured. “Gaby’s here.” Illya could feel him fumbling, and then there was a click and a sudden blinding light. It took him a lot of time for his one eye to adjust, but eventually he could make out Gaby in the beam of the flashlight, blinking hard, sitting with her back braced against the wall of the truck and her knees up, feet flat on the floor, hands buried in a round shape between them that turned out to be some kind of combat helmet filled with snow. Tendrils of her hair were plastered to her face, she was in a wet navy uniform that was too big for her and rolled up at the sleeves, there were streaks of somebody else’s blood on her neck, and from the look on her face, Illya figured that she might stop being pissed off if he gave her four or five years. She was shivering.

“You should really dry off,” Napoleon said, as if he could read Illya’s mind. 

“In a minute,” Gaby snapped. They had clearly had this exchange before. Then she looked at Illya, and he could read his own wreckage in the shift of her eyes. _Come here,_ he tried to say, but he didn’t know why, didn’t know what good he could do.

It turned out that his eyes were enough. "Sorry," she murmured. "Can't. My hands." When she lifted them from the helmet full of snow, they were already red, scraped and cut. The snow had kept swelling down, but not by much. Her knuckles were a wreck. 

"With you out of commission," said Napoleon in Illya's ear, "it fell to one of us to nearly ruin the mission with an uncontrollable outburst of rage that I found, frankly, uncivilized." The cadence of his voice was the usual, lazy, slightly derisive, but the tone was different. To Illya's ears, Napoleon sounded rather amused, possibly impressed.

"I lost my knife in the snow," Gaby said. "It takes longer without a knife." She was looking at Illya in the eyes now, and it struck him that she was speaking as he once had, the way he'd said _your vanity will get us all killed,_ only he couldn't quite parse her true meaning. It had to be something similar, though. Bloody knuckles and all, he'd rarely seen her so soft.

"Well, he's back now," said Napoleon, "so can we cut short the sulk? Come here."

Gaby hesitated. "Is he warm now?"

"Hot as a Saharan July. Aren't you, Illya?"

Illya gave a grunt that he hoped sounded encouraging, and watched her acquiesce without a word or even a blink. Napoleon could read it on her too; in a second, he had the flashlight turned off and stowed away, was reaching for her in the dark with his one free hand. In the dull rattle of the van, the snaps, the sounds of metal on metal as buckles were unbuckled, the heavy sound of wet cloth being rolled back, it all seemed loud, or maybe that was just because she was so close. Illya couldn't see a thing, but he still had the image of her stamped in yellow and orange on the back of his eyelids when he closed his eyes, from the flashlight. And he could imagine her well enough, all lithe muscle and smooth brown skin, when there was one last soft thud of the uniform on the floor. They'd all seen each other naked before, or close to it. Risks of the job. Perks of the job. He felt a rush of cold air as Napoleon lifted an edge of the blanket over them, and then Gaby slid in with a muffled _mmph_ followed by a, "Sorry," clumsy and tentative like she rarely ever was, except for when they were this close.

"Come _here,_ " said Napoleon, not unkindly, and then Gaby was against Illya. He could feel her shivering against him.

"We'll be there soon," she said, like an apology. Not too soon, Illya hoped. When he fell asleep, it was to the smell of cologne and wet hair, and he was, against all odds, happy.


End file.
